By Ian Herbert for the Daily Mail
It’s a rare elite cyclist who begins his reflections on life in the sport by admitting that he once wore pants under his Lycra kit at a race in Cardiff’s northern suburbs.
‘It led to an awkward but important conversation in the changing rooms,’ Geraint Thomas related. ”What, you’ve got pants on? ‘Well yeah, haven’t you?”
Geraint Thomas aged 16 in his school sports portrait
Many such shared stories made a book Thomas wrote a few years ago a publishing hit and genuinely one of the best in cycling’s vast literature.
He told of shaving his legs as a 14-year-old in a Port-a-loo at a race in Germany. Loving his first cycling-specific shades so much that he barely wore them.
Suffering such an extreme case of the chronic fatigue cyclists call ‘bonk’ that, after pedalling home, ‘I just kept nudging the doorbell with my forehead in the hope that someone inside might hear me.’
After 21 days in which the French have made it patently clear how much they loathe the clinical, robotic, po-faced Team Sky machine, grinding on to victory, Thomas provides the antidote.
Never has one deeply unpopular team more needed a winner as self-deprecating and human as the man they all call ‘G’.
There was normality from the start – not least school-days at Cardiff’s Whitchurch High School where Thomas, Gareth Bale and Sam Warburton were all alumni within a three year period in the last decade: a Welsh golden generation if ever there was one.
A life in cycling seems to have been a happy accident. The nine-year-old Thomas had turned up to swim at the local leisure centre, when he peered through a fence and saw the local Maindy Flyers club training on the track which encircles a neighbouring athletics track.
‘He came along a few days later and had a go himself,’ the club’s Debbie Wharton said on Friday. ‘When he first started, he was just like any of the other kids on the bike, wearing baggy shorts and trainers.’
The Lycra came later. Despite prodigious early promise, many were coming around to the view that the 32-year-old had been cut out for a life in the slipstream.
His years at the Tour de France have been defined by his work as a domestique for Chris Froome.
A bad day is ‘when Froome is alone in the front group of twenty and there are sixty kilometres to go,’ he said in the book, ‘The World of Cycling, According to G.’ (Even the title is a mickey-take.)
A good day is ‘when you deflect every nightmarish arrow slung at you. One by one, you throw yourself onto the pyre so that your leader may be venerated.’
Froome (right) appreciates the contribution Thomas has made to his four Tour de France wins
He has venerated Froome far less than Sir Bradley Wiggins, despite shepherding him to three Tour de France titles. It is impossible to avoid the impression that he likes Froome far more.
Thomas found Wiggins’ mood unpredictable, though he has found Froome’s lack of ego and often vacant personality endearing.
In one of their early encounters, Froome wore a traditional Kenyan sarong – ‘also known as a towel worn as a skirt,’ Thomas drily observed.
Thomas also delighted in Froome’s lack of cycling knowledge. ‘Who’s that Astana guy? He’s quick,’ he asked Thomas after the 2013 Tour of Oman. ‘Mate, it’s (Vincenzo) Nibali,’ Thomas informed him.
‘The success hasn’t gone to his head,’ Thomas has said of Froome. ‘He can handle the mickey-taking – about how he stays upright on his bike, that he knows nothing about anything but cycling today. Tell him you’re watching the Six Nations and he’ll ask which six and why, what are they doing?’
Even in the last three weeks, he’s been brutally straight about his own place in their dual pecking order. ‘I’m just ‘erm… maybe a bit more than a pawn,’ Thomas said after the defining Stage 12, when he eased away from Froome to record an historic second consecutive stage win at Alpe d’Huez.
That was the evening Chris Boardman wondered aloud about whether all this modesty was actually a cover for a slight mental deficit.
The Welshman, who rode 20 stages of the 2013 Tour with a broken hip, is treated after a crash
Thomas early in his career as an older teenager racing for a Welsh team, years before he would become a world champion
‘He’s had several opportunities in the past and… folded, Boardman said on ITV. ‘I think he’s a little bit fragile on that front and it’s a way to deflect the pressure.’
It was an allusion to the solitary off-days which Thomas always seems to have had in the mountains. He was fourth overall after a brilliant Stage 17 climb three years ago, but calamity on La Toussuire two days later saw him lose 22 minutes. He finished 15th.
Others who know Thomas well agree that his career in the shadows of others have left the question of that elusive winning mentality answered.
‘Others were always the stars,’ one source tells Sportsmail. ‘First Mark Cavendish, who he came through the track academy with, and then Wiggins and Froome on the road.
‘The elite competitors tend not to be normal. Thomas is balanced. You could have a pint with him. That’s not normal where these kinds of competitors are concerned.’